Michael Kenna is widely recognized as one of the world’s greatest and most influential living photographers. His personal, handmade, non-digital photographic prints have been shown in more than 600 gallery and museum exhibitions throughout the world. More than 70 monographs and exhibition catalogues have been published on his work. His limited-edition fine art prints are in the permanent collections of over 100 institutions, including the National Art Museum of China, the National Museum of Modern Art, Paris, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

     As a boy, though, before any of this, he was a student at the same Catholic seminary as Vincent Miles, St. Joseph’s College, Upholland, where they overlapped for four years. “Upholland” was a massive and truly magnificent edifice, but has been gradually falling into dereliction since it closed in the late 1990s.  Kenna visited several times in the early 2000s to take numerous photographs of the buildings and grounds, from which he selected close to a hundred for inclusion in this volume. The book also includes a deeply personal essay by Kenna about his time at the seminary, and an essay by Vincent Miles about the history of St. Joseph’s and of the Catholic seminary system more broadly.